In recent years, skills development has become a priority among developed and developing countries alike. The World Bank Group, in its quest to end extreme poverty and promote shared prosperity, has joined efforts with countries and multilateral development partners to ensure that individuals...

Governments around the world assign top priority to job creation and productivity growth. Developing the right skills among potential and actual workers not only makes capital and labor more productive, it also makes the adoption and invention of new technologies possible. Recent research also...

To stimulate economic advancement, low- and middle-income countries need well-educated and trained workforces to fill the types of skilled jobs that drive economic growth. Improving educational quality and attainment and providing better training are all rightly put forth as policy...

Most research on the economic payoffs of skills has used individuals' level of schooling attained-typically years or level of education or training received-as a key proxy for skills. Such research has consistently found that individual returns to schooling are positive and that returns tend to...

Gender-based wage discrimination is a highly researched area of labor economics. However, most studies on this topic have focused on schooling and paid limited attention to the mechanisms through which cognitive and noncognitive skills influence wages. This paper uses data from adults in seven...

This report presents the findings of an assessment of Tanzania's workforce development (WfD) system based on the World Bank's systems approach for better education results (SABER) WfD systems benchmarking tool. The focus is on policies, institutions, and practices in three important system...

This paper uses measures of cognitive and noncognitive skills in an expanded definition of human capital to examine how schooling and skills differ between men and women and how those differences relate to gender gaps in earnings across nine middle-income countries. The analysis finds that...